Leading With Your Heart and Guarding It Too: Lessons on Sustainability from Fifteen Years of School Leadership

Leadership Begins with the Heart

For 15 years, I tried to be the kind of school leader I would have wanted, which was one who met everyone’s needs all the time. I believed leadership begins with kindness. I believed it was essential to truly know people and to show up for them in a sincere, authentic way. I believed that if you gave your whole heart to a community, they would feel cared for and, in turn, do their best work for students and for one another, and with this leadership style in place, they did. I received positive feedback on a daily basis and I knew I was onto something. What I did not understand at the time was this: an open heart without boundaries slowly becomes an unsustainable one. 

Naming a Philosophy of Care

In 2022, Rowman & Littlefield published The Heart of School Leadership (Stahl, 2022), a book I wrote based on my 15 years as a teacher and 15 years as school leader. In it, I organized my philosophy into 50 areas I believed were essential to effective leadership ranging from kindness and visibility to instructional leadership and equity. These areas were supported by research, specifically the Challenge to Care (Noddings, 2005), among others. 

My book grew out of a deeply meaningful year when I served as a substitute principal in a large public elementary school. When that year ended, the faculty and staff gave me a red leather journal with a heart embossed on the front, filled with handwritten notes. It was more valuable than any title or salary I had earned. Those notes helped me unlock what I believed mattered most in leadership, and these ideals became the basis for my leadership book. This one was included in my preface:  

‘Don’t cry because she is gone, smile because she was here.’ I heard this quote at a memorial service yesterday for a woman who died just nine days’ shy of her 101st birthday. She was described as an angel on earth—sweet, subdued, and endlessly patient. I knew her well–it was an apt description. Yet, when those words were spoken, it was you who sprang to mind. At one time or another, I have worked in every school, both public and private, in this district. Over the years, I have worked with more administrators than I can count. Happily, I have been able to work with all of them. So when you came to our school, I expected the experience to be the same. It was. Here is what I didn’t expect. I didn’t expect to find a person behind the desk who treated everyone equally, whose warmth was real, and whose joy was freely expressed and meant for all.’ 

After leaving school leadership to teach college full time, I began using my book in my graduate courses. At the end of each semester, I asked students to select three leadership areas and reflect on how they would influence their future practice. The discussions were powerful. This assignment also led to discussions about school culture, teaching philosophy, leadership style, and the effect of kindness and positivity in schools. Students affirmed the importance of relationships, positivity, visibility, and trust. I also believed I had modeled what I had written and the students confirmed this. Then something shifted. 

When Students Redefined Care

When I presented my leadership framework at a professional conference, educators affirmed many of the relational traits I described. But they also raised questions I had not anticipated. Curious, I later sought IRB approval to more formally gather feedback from my graduate students. They weren’t yet working as teachers or leaders in the field so I was curious to see what they thought. It was an extra credit assignment where they rated the 50 categories as “important,” “somewhat important” or “not important” and added specific comments where they had feedback.  

Similar to the conference attendees, the graduate students supported relational leadership, but not leadership that meant being everything to everyone. They spoke about sustainability. About balance. About protecting personal health and family life. They did not reject care-based leadership. They redefined it. Their feedback unsettled me on several levels and made me wonder if I had possibly modeled and written about unsustainable leadership? 

When Devotion Becomes Depletion

For years, I had worn constant availability as a badge of honor. I answered calls while on vacation. I remember standing in Times Square, phone to my ear, listening to a teachers’ issue during spring break because it felt like what a committed leader would do, and I sincerely wanted to help. It’s who I am at my core. I was constantly available and responsive. I knew teachers’ children and dogs by name, and kept in touch with many after I left my last position. I attended every possible event. I was professionally available and often emotionally available, serving as part counselor as well as administrator. I believed this was devotion. In hindsight, I can see now that I had mistaken depletion for dedication. 

There was also another layer to confront. I had worked alongside male leaders who practiced leadership differently and were far less visible and available than I was. Whether because of gendered expectations or my own internal standards, the responsibility to be endlessly visible and accessible fell primarily on me. It was fulfilling. It was meaningful. But in hindsight, it was also heavy. 

Transition or Recovery?

When I transitioned into higher education, I experienced an quiet, unexpected loss of identity. I was no longer needed in the same urgent way. No one was calling during crises. No one required immediate decisions that only I could make. The teaching part came naturally, but I had also entered a world focused on research, publishing, and long-term scholarly contribution. It took me a while to understand this and I told myself I was simply in transition. It took some time to realize I was actually in recovery. 

Over the next several years, I was offered multiple leadership positions and encouraged to return to school leadership. Each time, I felt a visceral resistance I could not fully explain. I had loved serving as a school leader and during my tenure I was honestly happy and energized. I am also someone who regularly follows directions and does what I am told, so in many ways as a leader I was responding to what people asked of me and needed, and above all following, “the Golden Rule.” After being away from leadership for a few years, something in me knew I could not return to that version of myself, and the graduate students’ feedback helped me understand why. 

Sustainable Leadership for the Next Generation

Care-based leadership is essential. Schools are human institutions, and relationships matter deeply. But care that consumes the caregiver eventually undermines itself. Sustainable leadership requires boundaries, not as a retreat from responsibility, but as a protection of it. I still believe leadership begins with the heart. I still believe in knowing people, showing up, and building cultures of kindness, and I honestly wouldn’t change anything about my 15 years as a school leader because I am proud I gave so much. I believe I created a positive school culture. I now understand that I couldn’t have continued in that way, and that kindness must extend inward as well.  

As I reflected on my last few years in higher education, I saw that I had begun replicating the same pattern with my college students and have been committed to constant responsiveness, extreme care and immediate availability. I think I did not recognize the toll it was beginning to take until I reviewed the responses from my study. I think that maybe I was looking for the same validation, and my student feedback conveyed I was giving my all, but if that were true, what was I actually teaching them as future educators?  

The most meaningful lesson about leadership did not come from my years in administration or my own reflection after leaving it. It came from the graduate students who challenged my definition of care. They taught me that being everything to everyone is not the highest form of leadership. Sustainability is. To lead with your heart, you must also protect it. 

Dr. Mary Louise Stahl is currently an Assistant Professor at Niagara University in New York and also an adjunct professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia. She earned her PhD in Educational Leadership in 2016 from the State University of New York at Buffalo, with her dissertation, “Chinese Students in United States High Schools.” She has worked for over 30 years in education, as a teacher, a school leader, a college professor and a writer. In 2022 Rowman & Littlefield published her book, the Heart of School Leadership. 

References 

Noddings, N. (2005). The challenge to care: An alternative approach to education. New York: Teachers College Press.  

Stahl, M.L. (2002). The heart of school leadership. Rowman & Littlefield.